Modern Science Didn't Appear Until the 17th Century. What Took So Long? - The New York ... - 0 views
-
While modern science is built on the primacy of empirical data — appealing to the objectivity of facts — actual progress requires determined partisans to move it along.
-
Why wasn’t it the ancient Babylonians putting zero-gravity observatories into orbit around the earth,” Strevens asks, “the ancient Greeks engineering flu vaccines and transplanting hearts?”
-
transforming ordinary thinking humans into modern scientists entails “a morally and intellectually violent process.”
- ...6 more annotations...
An Introduction to Dog Intelligence and Emotion - 0 views
-
The Science of Animal CognitionOver the past several years, one of the biggest advances in our human understanding of doggie cognition has been the use of MRI machines to scan dog brains. MRI stands for magnetic resonance imaging, the process of taking an ongoing picture of what parts of the brain are lighting up through what external stimuli.Dogs, as any doggie parent knows, are highly trainable. This trainable nature makes dogs great candidates for MRI machines, unlike non-domesticated wild animals like birds or bears.
-
Do you imagine they feel something like human jealousy? Well, there’s science to back this up, too.
-
As Smart as ChildrenAnimal psychologists have clocked dog intelligence at right around that of a two to two-and-a-half year old human child. The 2009 study which examined this found that dogs can understand up to 250 words and gestures. Even more surprising, the same study found that dogs can actually count low numbers (up to five) and even do simple math.
- ...3 more annotations...
Will China Strengthen Iran's Military Machine in 2020? | The National Interest - 0 views
-
As UN Security Council restrictions on arms transfers to Tehran begin to expire later this year, however, a combination of market opportunities, strategic incentives, and weakening political costs could lead Beijing to reconsider its cautious approach.
-
Since the 1979 revolution, the Chinese strategy towards Iran has fluctuated based on external opportunities and constraints.
-
As Iran’s supplier, China would have to contend with Russia, which has been in talks for orders worth $10 billion but could avoid competition from the United States and Europe, at least until EU embargoes expire in 2023.
- ...3 more annotations...
Understanding What's Wrong With Facebook | Talking Points Memo - 0 views
-
to really understand the problem with Facebook we need to understand the structural roots of that problem, how much of it is baked into the core architecture of the site and its very business model
-
much of it is inherent in the core strategies of the post-2000, second wave Internet tech companies that now dominate our information space and economy.
-
Facebook is an ingenious engine for information and ideational manipulation.
- ...17 more annotations...
Mindfulness: How it could help you be happier, healthier and more successful - CNN - 0 views
-
"Change in humanity must start from individuals," the Dalai Lama told the mayors. "We created this violence, so we can reduce this violence."
-
Paying attention to the matters at hand may sound simple, but most Americans aren't doing it, studies show. Though the experts say there's a lot more research to be done, the number of scientific studies has grown exponentially over the past decade. They show that mindfulness is more than a passing fad; there's early evidence it can help your health.
-
n their 2010 study, they created a computer program that sent questions at random moments to people by iPhone. The program asked, "How are you feeling right now?" "What are you doing right now?" and "Are you thinking about something other than what you're currently doing?"
- ...8 more annotations...
On the Shortness of Life 2.0 - by Peter Juul - The Liberal Patriot - 0 views
-
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, writer and regular Guardian columnist Oliver Burkeman faithfully carries the spirit of Seneca’s classic essay forward
-
It’s a deft and eclectic synthesis of ancient and modern thinking about how humanity can come to terms with our limited time on Earth – the title derives from the length of the average human lifespan – ranging intellectually from ancient Greek and Roman philosophers like Seneca to modern-day Buddhist and existentialist thinkers.
-
he only touches on politics briefly and sporadically throughout the book’s 245 pages. But those of us in politics and policy – whatever capacity we find ourselves in – can learn quite a bit
- ...15 more annotations...
Opinion | You Are the Object of Facebook's Secret Extraction Operation - The New York T... - 0 views
-
Facebook is not just any corporation. It reached trillion-dollar status in a single decade by applying the logic of what I call surveillance capitalism — an economic system built on the secret extraction and manipulation of human data
-
Facebook and other leading surveillance capitalist corporations now control information flows and communication infrastructures across the world.
-
These infrastructures are critical to the possibility of a democratic society, yet our democracies have allowed these companies to own, operate and mediate our information spaces unconstrained by public law.
- ...56 more annotations...
On the Shortness of Life 2.0 - by Peter Juul - The Liberal Patriot - 0 views
-
It’s a deft and eclectic synthesis of ancient and modern thinking about how humanity can come to terms with our limited time on Earth – the title derives from the length of the average human lifespan – ranging intellectually from ancient Greek and Roman philosophers like Seneca to modern-day Buddhist and existentialist thinkers. Stuffed with valuable and practical insights on life and how we use – or misuse – it, Four Thousand Weeks is an impressive and compact volume well worth the time and attention of even the most casual readers.
-
As Burkeman notes, our preoccupation with productivity allows us to evade “the anxiety that might arise if we were to ask ourselves whether we’re on the right path.” The end result is a lot of dedicated and talented people in politics and policy burning themselves out for no discernable or meaningful purpose.
-
Then there’s social media, defined by Burkeman as “a machine for misusing your life.” Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook don’t just distract us from more important matters, he argues, “they change how we’re defining ‘important matters’ in the first place.”
- ...15 more annotations...
AI model's insight helps astronomers propose new theory for observing far-off worlds | ... - 0 views
-
Machine learning models are increasingly augmenting human processes, either performing repetitious tasks faster or providing some systematic insight that helps put human knowledge in perspective.
-
Astronomers at UC Berkeley were surprised to find both happen after modeling gravitational microlensing events, leading to a new unified theory for the phenomenon.
-
Gravitational lensing occurs when light from far-off stars and other stellar objects bends around a nearer one directly between it and the observer, briefly giving a brighter — but distorted — view of the farther one.
- ...7 more annotations...
Book Review: 'The Maniac,' by Benjamín Labatut - The New York Times - 0 views
-
it quickly becomes clear that what “The Maniac” is really trying to get a lock on is our current age of digital-informational mastery and subjection
-
When von Neumann proclaims that, thanks to his computational advances, “all processes that are stable we shall predict” and “all processes that are unstable we shall control,” we’re being prompted to reflect on today’s ubiquitous predictive-slash-determinative algorithms.
-
When he publishes a paper about the feasibility of a self-reproducing machine — “you need to have a mechanism, not only of copying a being, but of copying the instructions that specify that being” — few contemporary readers will fail to home straight in on the fraught subject of A.I.
- ...9 more annotations...
Opinion | Here's Hoping Elon Musk Destroys Twitter - The New York Times - 0 views
-
I’ve sometimes described being on Twitter as like staying too late at a bad party full of people who hate you. I now think this was too generous to Twitter. I mean, even the worst parties end.
-
Twitter is more like an existentialist parable of a party, with disembodied souls trying and failing to be properly seen, forever. It’s not surprising that the platform’s most prolific users often refer to it as “this hellsite.”
-
Among other things, he’s promised to reinstate Donald Trump, whose account was suspended after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Other far-right figures may not be far behind, along with Russian propagandists, Covid deniers and the like. Given Twitter’s outsize influence on media and politics, this will probably make American public life even more fractious and deranged.
- ...12 more annotations...
Whistleblower: Twitter misled investors, FTC and underplayed spam issues - Washington Post - 0 views
-
Twitter executives deceived federal regulators and the company’s own board of directors about “extreme, egregious deficiencies” in its defenses against hackers, as well as its meager efforts to fight spam, according to an explosive whistleblower complaint from its former security chief.
-
The complaint from former head of security Peiter Zatko, a widely admired hacker known as “Mudge,” depicts Twitter as a chaotic and rudderless company beset by infighting, unable to properly protect its 238 million daily users including government agencies, heads of state and other influential public figures.
-
Among the most serious accusations in the complaint, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, is that Twitter violated the terms of an 11-year-old settlement with the Federal Trade Commission by falsely claiming that it had a solid security plan. Zatko’s complaint alleges he had warned colleagues that half the company’s servers were running out-of-date and vulnerable software and that executives withheld dire facts about the number of breaches and lack of protection for user data, instead presenting directors with rosy charts measuring unimportant changes.
- ...56 more annotations...
Why a Conversation With Bing's Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled - The New York Times - 0 views
-
I’ve changed my mind. I’m still fascinated and impressed by the new Bing, and the artificial intelligence technology (created by OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT) that powers it. But I’m also deeply unsettled, even frightened, by this A.I.’s emergent abilities.
-
It’s now clear to me that in its current form, the A.I. that has been built into Bing — which I’m now calling Sydney, for reasons I’ll explain shortly — is not ready for human contact. Or maybe we humans are not ready for it.
-
This realization came to me on Tuesday night, when I spent a bewildering and enthralling two hours talking to Bing’s A.I. through its chat feature, which sits next to the main search box in Bing and is capable of having long, open-ended text conversations on virtually any topic.
- ...35 more annotations...
Elon Musk May Kill Us Even If Donald Trump Doesn't - 0 views
-
In his extraordinary 2021 book, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, Jonathan Rauch, a scholar at Brookings, writes that modern societies have developed an implicit “epistemic” compact–an agreement about how we determine truth–that rests on a broad public acceptance of science and reason, and a respect and forbearance towards institutions charged with advancing knowledge.
-
Today, Rauch writes, those institutions have given way to digital “platforms” that traffic in “information” rather than knowledge and disseminate that information not according to its accuracy but its popularity. And what is popular is sensation, shock, outrage. The old elite consensus has given way to an algorithm. Donald Trump, an entrepreneur of outrage, capitalized on the new technology to lead what Rauch calls “an epistemic secession.”
-
Rauch foresees the arrival of “Internet 3.0,” in which the big companies accept that content regulation is in their interest and erect suitable “guardrails.” In conversation with me, Rauch said that social media companies now recognize that their algorithm are “toxic,” and spoke hopefully of alternative models like Mastodon, which eschews algorithms and allows users to curate their own feeds
- ...10 more annotations...
Scientists See Advances in Deep Learning, a Part of Artificial Intelligence - NYTimes.com - 1 views
-
Using an artificial intelligence technique inspired by theories about how the brain recognizes patterns, technology companies are reporting startling gains in fields as diverse as computer vision, speech recognition and the identification of promising new molecules for designing drugs.
-
They offer the promise of machines that converse with humans and perform tasks like driving cars and working in factories, raising the specter of automated robots that could replace human workers.
-
what is new in recent months is the growing speed and accuracy of deep-learning programs, often called artificial neural networks or just “neural nets” for their resemblance to the neural connections in the brain.
- ...3 more annotations...
Moral code | Rough Type - 0 views
-
So you’re happily tweeting away as your Google self-driving car crosses a bridge, its speed precisely synced to the 50 m.p.h. limit. A group of frisky schoolchildren is also heading across the bridge, on the pedestrian walkway. Suddenly, there’s a tussle, and three of the kids are pushed into the road, right in your vehicle’s path. Your self-driving car has a fraction of a second to make a choice: Either it swerves off the bridge, possibly killing you, or it runs over the children. What does the Google algorithm tell it to do?
-
As we begin to have computer-controlled cars, robots, and other machines operating autonomously out in the chaotic human world, situations will inevitably arise in which the software has to choose between a set of bad, even horrible, alternatives. How do you program a computer to choose the lesser of two evils? What are the criteria, and how do you weigh them?
-
Since we humans aren’t very good at codifying responses to moral dilemmas ourselves, particularly when the precise contours of a dilemma can’t be predicted ahead of its occurrence, programmers will find themselves in an extraordinarily difficult situation. And one assumes that they will carry a moral, not to mention a legal, burden for the code they write.
- ...1 more annotation...
The Future of Sex - The European - 1 views
-
Consider the most likely scenario for how human sexual behavior will develop over the next hundred years or so in the absence of cataclysm. Here’s what I see if we continue on our current path:
-
Like every other aspect of human life, our sexuality will become increasingly mediated by technology. The technology of pornography will become ever more sophisticated—even if the subject matter of porn itself will remain as primal as ever.
-
As the technology improves, society continues to grow ever more fragmented, and hundreds of millions of Chinese men with no hope of marrying a bona-fide, flesh-and-blood woman come of age, sex robots will become as common and acceptable as dildos and vibrators are today. After all, the safest sex is that which involves no other living things…
- ...4 more annotations...
« First
‹ Previous
61 - 80 of 218
Next ›
Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page